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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

If the box you are running in is a VM, the VM host is already providing hardware redundancy. It’s not full redundancy but in practice it’s sufficient for dog photo sharing sites.

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As far as I know only Google Cloud does ‘hardware redundancy’[0]. I’ve had single-instance outages in AWS and they don’t seem to really care if something goes wrong with your instance, although maybe they have more maintenance events than they let on and they might happen transparently to the user thanks to some form of live migration.

0: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/live-migrati...

I’m not talking about live migration - the instance will go down and there will be a brief outage while the instance restarts on another hypervisor. The same is true of a single dyno Heroku app.

For AWS, nothing involved there is automatic; you have to stop it* and then restart it. It will just stay broken until you restart it yourself. "Brief outage" suggests it might be automatic but in AWS it's not.

* Possibly multiple times. Instances on degraded hosts have a tendency to get stuck and you have to stop, and then stop again to force stop it, and then sometimes even that doesn't work and you have to just wait.

Source: have received lots of "EC2 Instance Retirement" emails

This is what autoscaling groups are for, right? If set the autoscaler to keep one instance running it will spin another one when they retire the one you’re using.

“Weeks of reading AWS documentation will save you hours of learning about infrastructure”

the topic is here is ease of use.

Comparing Heroku to VMs and correctly configured ASGs is fine for me as a sysadmin, but they’re not targeting the same simplicity.

Yep, and if you know enough to set that up, you probably don't need Dokku.

An ASG isn’t nearly as difficult as setting up, securing, and running dokku. There’s even examples and such for setting up the ASG. If you get stuck, all accounts have free support and stack overflow is a few clicks away. The idea that one needs to switch to dokku to avoid setting up ASGs is just silly.

My suggestion was the opposite: don't use Dokku, because you probably don't need it if you're capable of dinking around with AWS.

Not any more. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/03/amazon-ec... In theory. But yes, sometimes detaching resources can take a long time on a degraded host.

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